Into the Wild Mushrooms: Time to read up on how to avoid accidental death

Kevin Brooker, Swerve11.25.2013

Mushrooms on the brain?: Untamed Feast’s Eric Whitehead will be showing off his line of wild mushrooms at the Art Market Art & Craft Fair, today through Sunday at the Telus Convention Centre, with cooking demonstrations, tasting samples and product sales.

In a foggy, mid-autumn hike north of Radium Hot Springs, we were gobsmacked by the number and variety of mushrooms poking out of the mossy forest floor, and by the subsequent realization: How did we get this far in life without ever thinking to gather any?

We were far from a guidebook, however, and it’s seldom wise to put poison on the menu. (It’s not for nothing that a notorious group of Seattle fungus-fanciers calls its annual shindig the Survivor’s Banquet.) But then, I thought, surely there’s an app for this—and there is, a free one. One shaky download later, we were able to identify numerous robust patches of Suillus luteus, an edible variety sometimes called slippery jacks. Or were they larch boletes, a.k.a. Suillus grevillei? Much Internet checking ensued, enough to give us confidence that garlic and butter wouldn’t be wasted. They made for a magnificent appetizer, we decided, and going on living afterward is a terrific bonus.

I decided right then that I needed to hook up with the Alberta Mycological Society, or better yet, meet some of the Eastern Europeans whose traditional foraging skills are renowned. But I’m lazy, so instead I rang up Eric Whitehead, proprietor of Untamed Feast, one of the country’s leading purveyors of wild mushrooms. I sensed how much I have to learn when I told him what we’d eaten, and he replied dryly, “Not in my top 100.”

Whitehead grew up on Vancouver Island, where his Ukrainian grandmother bequeathed to him the mushroom-gathering gene. For a while in the ’90s he collected pine mushrooms, or matsutakes, during a brief gold rush that went bust when the Japanese economy tanked. Later, he moved into gathering choice edibles like the chanterelles of autumn and the morels of spring (neither of which can be cultivated), and supplying top restaurants like Sooke Harbour House north of Victoria.

What shocked Whitehead, though, was how much those places charged for dishes containing his product. He decided to change his business model to focus on consumers, and moved his business from the raincoast to St. Albert, Alberta, which is closer to the rich habitat of the boreal forest. “This is pure, wild food, packed with nutrients,” he explains. “I want people to get this in their houses, not have to go to a place where they charge you an arm and a leg. We’ll only charge you an arm.”

True enough. I picked up a few bags of Untamed Feast at the excellent little shop called Soffritto in Canyon Meadows, a place devoted to ultra-fine ingredients, price be damned. At $18.99 for a 20-gram bag of morels, chanterelles or porcini, this is not for everyday dining. But Untamed Feast is definitely opening up markets. “Alberta is about five years behind Vancouver in terms of the saturation of local food suppliers,” says Whitehead. “Plus, people have money to spend.”

Videos on their website show you exactly why the price will never come down. It is brutal, buggy work for his crews to stomp through recently burnt forests and muskeg, looking for morels that may not even be there.

Whitehead advocates simple recipes to get the most from his pride and joy. I made his cream pasta sauce from the chanterelles, which are originally picked on Haida Gwaii, then dried, alder-smoked and, finally, cured in former wine casks. As for the flavour, the English language is too adjective-poor to adequately convey the earthiness of chanterelles. It reminded me of my tragic conclusion the first time I tried caviar. This stuff is crazy good, and I’ll never be rich enough to get all I want.

I will, therefore, be studying up this winter. Whitehead recommends David Arora’s seminal classic, Mushrooms Demystified, with keys to over 2,000 species.

Meanwhile, Whitehead appeared on Dragon’s Den last week. The Dragons drooled, but it was marketing whiz Arlene Dickinson who won the bidding war. Expect, therefore, to see more of Untamed Feast soon in stores near you.

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Into the Wild Mushrooms: Time to read up on how to avoid accidental death

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